“Oh, no, Mein Führer.”

“General Weidling can’t eat a corncob. Nubby bits of husk get under his upper plate. I had hoped he would give up meat as he has to use a spoon for every manner of eating. I try to keep his suffering in mind.”

“How unfortunate for Herr Weidling, a man so refined and appreciative of Wagner,” Magda says.

I report without thinking, “After his nephew’s plane went down, Göring was plagued with toothaches.”

“Toothaches? Even in a castle?” Magda asks slyly.

“He does like staying in medieval places. It was fun to visit him at Castle Veldenstein.”

“Göring is no longer my concern,” Adi interrupts without emotion.

Butter glows on the cobs as I realize I’ve said the wrong thing. How happy Magda must be.

“Those awful green elk-skin jerkins with leather yellow buttons that Göring wears. And his silly scarlet sword belt inlaid with gold.” Magda giggles. “He has more electric train sets than my children.”

“Not now,” I add. “Not since you only let the children take one toy with them.”

Magda’s face flushes in anger. “Something that awful Hermann would say.”

“Enough about Hermann Göring,” Adi snaps. “He’s not relevant.”

“Musical corn,” Hans says, chomping rhythmically and attempting to change the subject. He holds the cob respectfully.

“Corn and music are necessary opposites,” Adi says.

Adi puts a cob in each of the children’s hands, even the baby. Only able to suck the oil, the baby licks the grease as light yellow spit drips into runnels down her fat neck.

Two furry rats scurry along the wall, and I’m thankful Magda and the children can’t see them. To hear their infantile screams is aggravating.

Adi puts his teeth on the tender golden nubs to show the children how to eat it. They laugh, smearing the rare and hard-to-find creamy butter on their chins. Little wattles of yellow get wedged between their teeth. Helga looks like a squirrel munching and chewing. I smile. But Helga won’t be laughed at. Not since her monthlies began. She’s a woman. Throwing the cob down, she frowns at me. Adi puts his arm around Helga and lets her nibble from his own cob. Side by side, their lips move slowly along the yellow grist.

“Chew briskly,” Adi tells the children. “Chew manly. Teeth should chomp in d-major.” Taking exaggerated mouthfuls, I see his bleeding gums. As they make loud crunchy sounds, the children chuckle. He takes a napkin and with a magic touch folds it into a toy dog with jaws.

“You’re orchestrating the music of digestion. Make symphonies, my little ones.” His napkin-puppet slides the cob from Helga’s lips and tosses the yellow carcass on the table.

Helga hasn’t forgiven me for laughing at her. Sitting close to Adi, she refuses to glance in my direction. I don’t like her getting all Adi’s attention, not so close to my wedding day. I’ve been good to Helga, taking care of her when she got a sore throat last week, making a compress by stuffing oats in a wool stocking to lay on her throat, helping Fräulein Manzialy simmer soup for her like my mother used to make, hot milk with semolina. We added bits of horsemeat, but I would never tell Adi. Horses are very precious to him.

Magda triumphs in Helga’s hold on the Führer, placing the youngest on a blanket so they both can look up at him with admiration. Underneath her skirt, large thighs are folded in a hollow dip between her legs as she sits on the floor. It’s rumored that Dr. Morell enlarged her labium for she has the biggest crotch I’ve ever seen, and Hans’ eyes stare longingly at this hollow that Dr. Morell said was already so huge a baby could wiggle out feet first.

Magda also has rutty noises when she makes love, she confides, little belches due to her excessive vagina. Dr. Morell keeps her up to date with these medical side effects because of his research on the rabbits of Ravensbrück.

Göring tells me hundreds dip into Magda’s waters daily but not one has an idea. What does it matter when handsome men in heavy reindeer-skin coats gravitate to her? Long automatics in black leather sheaths send her into uncontrollable craving. Taught the pleasures of the body by hummingbirds, she imagines long spouts penetrating her flower.

Partial to our elite ski units, she reminds me that a ski trooper covers more ground in the winter than an infantry soldier in the summer. Magda likes men who cover large territories. Last winter, Captain Helwig Vielwerth came skiing to the Berghof wearing his sweater with a German Eagle and swastika on the front, an officer who uses adjutants to caddy his skis up the mountain. The first to greet him, Magda held out a mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream as she took the situation map from the Herr Captain that he’d been ordered to give Bormann. Soon Magda and Helwig were on the slopes together for hours, Magda using a pair of special white skis that her husband took from a shipment destined for our soldiers in Russia. She adored making love in the snow, but only when there wasn’t any wind chill. It was frigid enough without the howling gales and rustic enough being ravished by the swirl of careless white flaky snow. She didn’t like her eyes getting red rimmed from the cold, but it was worth it when she saw the captain trail-reading noiselessly for uncharted paths, his toe-binding making it easy to kick off his skis quickly as soon as he found a protected spot to lay her down. But keeping his skis on was her suggestion as that’s the way she liked it. Bending before her, he would crouch as before an inviting hill, and she’d open her long fur jacket so he could enter her vigorously—just as he would enter the pathless wilds. Helwig is an expert in terrain skills and knew all the ways of winding through a forest, moving through any woods as smoothly as in the open landscape. Her pubes would get little frozen skin patches, and he’d sweetly tap her frostbit mound to make a clinking sound… clink… clink… clink. This would inflame them with added desire, and they’d go on and on until his yank cramped and the slopes became dim from the setting sun. Magda was rewarded with hundreds of snow fleas jumping from one of her thighs to the other.

Magda teaches me much about lust, how desire sneaks up capturing the skin. On visiting a hospital a year after the war started, I was embraced by a major with no arms who had sulfanilamides dusted over his entire body along with greasy unguents. His doctor told him he could do anything any man could do… go down on a woman… stand shoulder to shoulder with the Luftwaffe… smoke a cigar. Having never met Adi, the major had been on the Führer’s Autobahnen so much he felt personally close to him. Looking at this poor wounded warrior, I remembered Adi telling me about Napoleon who placed his hand on the plague-stricken sick in a hospital at Jaffa. So I patted the major and put a single white carnation behind his ear so touched by how neatly his empty sleeves were folded. To thank me he used his shoulders as limbs and gave me a mystical clasp. It’s strange, but I suddenly felt the sensation of the scalpel that entered his wounds, wounds he said that were washed in wine on the battlefield because wine was all they had. In that mystical hug, I experienced his open flesh as it received the knife. That armless embrace was so spiritual and yet so full of appetite that I had to rush home to ease myself. Taking off the white “sulfur dress,” I rubbed it back and forth between my legs as I do with a Mauser. I have my own Mauser just like soldiers on leave are required to carry all the time (though it wasn’t until General Krebs’ pistol practice that I learned its proper use).

That “sulfur dress” reminds me of silly Saint Catherine of Sienna who the nuns talked about when I was in school, the saint who saved pus from the lesions of dying women and kept it in bowls all around her. To show humility, Catherine drank the drainage. Even as a child, I’ve always thought this really proved nothing as humility is of no value, certainly not in times of war. Rubbing against a dress drenched in sulphur makes more sense.

Springing up from the table, Adi tires of the children and returns to the map room. The baby cries for him as he leaves. General Krebs has just arrived, and there will soon be heated arguments. I will record everything carefully as I always do though Goebbels continually tells me that my scribblings are not my duty as he is recording everything in a journal that’s been photographed onto glass plates and carefully stored away.

“Are you writing in third person… like Caesar?” Goebbels asks.

“I’m writing in intimate person… like me.”

“You can’t achieve distance that way.”

“I achieve tenderness that way.”

I know my memoir has emotions in it as well as loving details. Only I can record all the many sensitive qualities of the Führer. But I do wonder… what will happen to these pages?

A small sandbox Magda made for the children is under the staircase. Nobody knows this, but when the children are sleeping, I go there and draw what I’ve heard to visualize rearguard movement, group formations, the taking of bridges, mountain attacks. Battle strategy doesn’t bore me at all. And I focus on Germany’s great victories. I wouldn’t want Adi to find out I wasn’t respectful of his triumphs.

Finally wrenching his eyes away from Magda’s crotch, Hans stands. “I have wounded to fly out. Please, consider this last chance when we’re still able to reach the Pichelsdorf bridge.”

Magda waves him off with her soft glossy hand. Drenched in cream, she’s taken time to moisten her hands sometime between Hans’ entrance and her children’s napping. With so much rationing, Magda never has trouble finding lotion. She directs Josef’s orderlies (she calls them coat-carriers) to go out and look for any line to stand in telling them it’s not important what might be at the other end. Hopefully there’s perfume. One captain brought in some gold dust he found, and Magda ate it with her morning bowl of millet. She expected golden stools. The gold dust only gave her diarrhea and stunk up the place. Circulation is not always good, and we in the Bunker are mad for perfume. I usually rub against a block of wild juniper for a more natural scent that Adi appreciates.